The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things
else to support and agree with it.—Francis Bacon, 1620.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage
in it.—Henry Ford.

Imagine meeting someone for the first time. When you first set eyes on her, you would
recognize her as being a person and a woman, and you would note certain facts about
her—perhaps her height, build, and hair color, or the type of clothes she is wearing. You
may also infer other facts about her—estimate her age and activities from her behavior, or
guess where she grew up from her accent. In addition, you will probably make other, more
subjective judgments about her—her personality, interests, attractiveness, intelligence,
friendliness, and so on. Some of your judgments may be influenced by stereotypes that
you already hold about different categories of people—about Southerners, overweight
people, athletic types, or socialites. Even though you have only just met her, you will
already have developed a set of expectations and opinions about her.

All of these types of perception and judgment fall in the realm of social cognition. Social cognition refers to our thought processes about other people, ourselves, and social
situations—that is, how we understand and make sense of social stimuli. Social cognition
includes the ways in which people gather social information, organize it, and interpret
it (Kunda, 1999). It is intimately related to the topic of attitudes, for social perceptions,
beliefs, and attributions comprise the cognitive components on which attitudes are based.

As a research area, social cognition experienced an explosion of activity starting about
1975 (Higgins & Bargh, 1987; Wyer & Srull, 1994), including the publication of new
journals, handbooks, and influential textbooks; and by 1990 it had become the most
heavily studied area in social psychology (Hamilton, Devine, & Ostrom, 1994). In her
1998 review chapter, Taylor stated, “Although the numbers are waning now, at one time,
social cognition was believed to account for more than 85 percent of the submissions
[to the leading social psychology journal]” (p. 72).

CHARACTERISTICS OF PERCEPTION

The first stage of social cognition is perception, the reception and organization of sensory information about people or social situations. Social perception, like our perception
of any object or situation, has a number of important characteristics (Schneider, Hastorf,
& Ellsworth, 1979). We can illustrate these characteristics by considering a concrete situation: You have just entered an office and you see another person seated behind a desk.

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